Lewis Carroll is the pen-name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898), a writer of nonsense literature and a mathematician in Christ Church at the University of Oxford in England. He was a close friend of the Liddell family: Henry Liddell had many children and he was the Dean of the College. Carroll used to tell stories to the young Alice (born in 1852) and her two elder sisters, Lorina and Edith. One day—on 4 July 1862—Carroll went with his friend, the Reverend Robinson Duckworth, and the three girls on a boat paddling trip for an afternoon picnic on the banks of a river. On this trip on the river, Carroll told a story about a girl named Alice and her amazing adventures down a rabbit hole. Alice asked him to write the story for her, and in time, the draft manuscript was completed. After rewriting the story, the book was published in 1865, and since that time, various versions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland were released in many various languages. And now, here is a version in Hawaiian as well.

In the nineteenth century, many stories of foreign lands were published in Hawaiian, such as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas and Ivanhoe. Ivanhoe is a story of William the Conqueror who came from France and con­quered England in 1066, a portion of the story of which is recounted in this tale of ʻĀleka. ʻĀleka is a story of the nineteenth century, though it is not one of the foreign stories that were translated into Hawaiian in that era. I decided to try and maintain the translation and writing style of the era with regard to this translation by using the foreign stories translated into Hawaiian in the nineteenth century as reference texts and models to follow with regards to the type of language and the style of translation used for this story. Through nineteenth-century translations, Hawaiian readers were taught a great many things about various countries, such as animals not found in the Hawaiian Islands and various cultures and foreign tongues. Hawaiians of that century were very curious about peoples and cultures around the world and it is for this reason that those of the era were attracted to stories from various places around the world.

In this translation, some types of Hawaiian idioms were used in the telling of the story, such as in the part in Chapter III where the daughter crab was scolding her mother who was complaining. The daughter chided her mother so that the animals around them would not hear her complaining. In scolding her, the daughter exclaims, “E hāmau ka leo!” (‘Silence the voice!’) followed up with, “o haunaele ʻEwa i ka Moaʻe!” (‘otherwise ʻEwa will riot in the Moaʻe wind!’). Just as Hawaiian idioms were used at times in foreign stories that were translated into Hawaiian in the nineteenth century, I thought to follow the same approach here.

Some of the poems or songs contained in this tale were translated literally while attempting to integrate some styles of uniquely Hawaiian poetic composition, such as in the poem before Chapter I which begins with the line, “ʻAui ka lā mālaʻelaʻe”, and the song of the Lobster-Quadrille in Chapter X beginning with the line, “E wiki ka hele”. Some of the other songs and poems, however, are rather original compositions that are based on themes or ideas found in the original English text. An example of this is the poem found in Chapter VII of the original English version, “Twinkle, twinkle little bat, how I wonder what you’re at”, which was rendered in Hawaiian: “ʻAuhea ʻoe, e ka ʻōpeʻapeʻa iki, puoho lele ʻōpeʻapeʻa ma ka lewa” (‘Hear me, little bat, startled, the bats take to the air’).

I thank Jon Lindseth for making me aware of this project and I also thank Michael Everson for his clarifications regarding some of the obscure parts of the original Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. All errors or inaccuracies contained in this Hawaiian version are strictly my own.